01 Apr 2005

With the Face of a Tyrant Before Their Eyes

LA SCALA this past week has been like the Kremlin during the putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev. For days on end, no-one knew who was in charge or what was going on. The only certainty was that the world would never be the same again.

Riccardo Muti

A coup of operatic proportions frees La Scala from the tyrant's grip

NORMAN LEBRECHT [The Scotsman, 28 Mar 05]

LA SCALA this past week has been like the Kremlin during the putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev. For days on end, no-one knew who was in charge or what was going on. The only certainty was that the world would never be the same again.

Riccardo Muti is gone from La Scala, that much is clear. Omnipotent for 19 years, the music director walked out when the opera company rose up against his ousting of an internally popular sovrintendente (general manager), Carlo Fontana, and his replacement by the more pliant Mauro Meli. Muti, affronted, declared that he could no longer make music in "the atmosphere created by the insinuations, the insults and the incomprehension".

The renowned Italian conductor Riccardo Muti is so depressed by the crisis at Milan's La Scala theatre that he may give up music altogether, his wife was quoted as saying yesterday. Cristina Mazzavillani told an interviewer: "I really don't know if he still has the will to work."